NASA Rover to Explore… Greenland

Below:

Next story in Science

NASA's newest rover won't be exploring another planet, but will
take a look at part of our own. Named Grover (short for Goddard
Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research), the
rover will explore Greenland's ice sheets to better understand
how they form, and how quickly they may be melting.

The device is solar-powered and semi-autonomous, and will embark
on its first mission beginning tomorrow (May 3), and continuing
until June 8. It was developed from 2010-2011 by teams of
students in summer engineering boot camps at Goddard Space Flight
Center in Maryland, according to a release from NASA.

The 6-foot-tall, 800-pound rover is equipped with
ground-penetrating radar that will send "radio wave pulses into
the ice sheet, and the waves bounce off buried features,
informing researchers about the characteristics of the snow and
ice layers," according to the NASA statement. [ Video:
Grover the Rover to Explore Greenland Ice Sheet ]

At first Grover will operate near the National Science
Foundation's Summit Camp, located at the apex of Greenland's ice
sheet. Once it appears the rover is functioning properly, it will
roam more widely and be controlled via satellite. Since the
Arctic sun shines 24 hours a day during the summer, the
solar-powered rover will be able to operate continuously, NASA
said.

"We think it's really powerful," Gabriel Trisca, a Boise State
master's degree student who developed Grover's software, said in
the NASA statement. "The fact is the robot could be anywhere in
the world and we'll be able to control it from anywhere."

Grover should shed light on Greenland's snow accumulation.
Researchers can compare annual accumulation to the amount of ice
lost to the sea each year to find out how much mass is being lost
to melting, and how much Greenland's ice is contributing to sea
level rise.

Greenland's ice sheets contain a vast store of freshwater that
could affect global sea levels, and more and more ice is melting.
In fact, Greenland's
ice loss is accelerating by about 22 gigatons (22 cubic
kilometers) of ice each year, according to a 2012 study.

Last summer, satellite images showed that about 40 percent of the
ice sheet had thawed near the surface on July 8; only four days
later, images showed a dramatic increase in melting with
thawing across 97 percent of the ice sheet surface.